Why Every Man Needs a Great Rival

One day last May, Sean “Puff Daddy’’ Combs, whose $700 million fortune ranked him number one on the Forbes list of “Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists” in 2014, woke up to some humbling news. Apple Inc. had just acquired Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion.

That meant Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, cofounder of the headphone company and number two on that same list at $550 million, had hip-hopped over him. Dre was touting himself as lead contender to become hip-hop’s first billionaire.

Combs, who once sang “It’s all about the Benjamins,” must have had that sick feeling in his stomach, the one we all feel on being outearned or outclassed by a rival.

He fired back, of course. Within days he announced plans to turn his Sean John clothing line into a billion-dollar brand.

That’s exactly how rivalries are supposed to work: It’s not about pointed lyrics or guns in nightclubs or even, really, the Benjamins. No, a rival is what pushes us to become stronger, faster, smarter, and more creative. It’s what inspires us to be the one, as a Dr. Dre lyric puts it, “still running the game.”

Rivalries on the playing field work the same way: Remember little-known quarterback Russell Wilson crushing five-time MVP Peyton Manning in front of 111 million people in the Super Bowl, and then getting crushed himself by an even bigger superstar, Tom Brady, in front of an even bigger audience (114 million)?

Rivalries also happen in the corporate world: Think of CVS trumping Walgreens by becoming the first drugstore chain to ban tobacco sales.

And chess, of course, is rife with one-upmanship, preferably with a dollop of humiliation, as, say, when 23-year-old Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen introduced Bill Gates to inferiority in an onstage lightning match.

Even the rarefied worlds of science, music, and art see cutthroat competition: Perhaps you heard about the Bolshoi Ballet dancer who, seething with resentment that he and his ballerina girlfriend weren’t getting the plum roles, plotted an acid attack on its director. (“This never happened in my day,” an older dancer remarked. “You’d hit each other in the face in the dressing room and that was that.”)

Marketplace niches and geographic proximity tend to heat up these matches. That’s part of what drives the feverish productivity of Silicon Valley, for instance. But that guy in the cubicle next door is just as liable to stir up those same passions.

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Couldn’t we all just get along? Couldn’t we be nice, the way our teachers always urged us to?

An entire generation, maybe two, has grown up under a classroom ideology that views individual reward as a “correlate of macho attitudes,” as one scholar put it, and “damaging to both intrinsic motivation and creativity,” according to another.

The shift in education to a learning style that’s arguably better suited to girls has made cooperation a major focus. But everywhere else in our lives, especially for boys and men, competition still rules.

Understanding how to live with rivalries—when to cooperate and when to compete, what’s a smart tactic and what’s just stupid, how to use rivalry to boost performance and how to avoid being dragged down by it into despair—is a perilous business.

Sooner or later we all need a remedial course in the art of living with—and appreciating—our enemies.

Your rival, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is someone of roughly similar background (in gender, age, sport played, job title, or specialty at work, for example) who more or less evenly matches you in skill and with whom you face off in repeated competitive encounters.

If you don’t think you have a rival, that could be your first problem. There is truth in one Hollywood agent’s assertion that “you’re no one in this town unless someone wants you dead.”

Having a rival, being able to get under somebody else’s skin, doesn’t mean you have arrived. But it says you’re in the race. It says people worry about what you might do next.

Our recurring competitive bouts against known rivals ratchet up anxiety, excitement, and also performance. Oddly, considering that rivalries date back at least to Cain and Abel, the science of rivalry is relatively new, and researchers have only begun to measure its effect on performance.

But when NYU’s Gavin Kilduff, Ph.D., studied the running community in State College, Pennsylvania, he found that going up against a rival could cut 25 seconds off a competitive runner’s 5K time. Would that kind of performance boost also show up in nonathletic rivalries?

In one experiment, Uri Gneezy, Ph.D., an expert in behavioral economics at UC San Diego, gave people the choice to earn money at either a piece rate or a competitive basis for solving puzzles. Men (but not women) preferred to compete—and going up against rivals dramatically increased their output.

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Rivalry in creativity is harder to test, but competition also seems to boost creative output. The Beatles were so fabulous, according to this theory, partly because the songwriting duo of Paul McCartney and John Lennon enjoyed what Lennon called “a little competition. . . as to who got the A side, who got the hit singles.” Each wanted to top the other.

That same dynamic (though it was more sibling warfare than mild competition) drove the success of the band Oasis for 18 tumultuous years, with songwriter Noel Gallagher and frontman Liam Gallagher endlessly clashing even while complementing each other’s talents.

Outside rivals help too. The Beatles benefited from what producer George Martin called a “curious transatlantic slugging match,” a rivalry carried out against Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys through song and in the recording studio.

Oasis, likewise, had a vast Billboard catalog of rivals, as evidenced by Liam’s remarks “We will be as big as the Beatles, if not bigger” and “There’s Elvis and me. I couldn’t say which of the two is best.”

These internal and external rivalries can inspire or distract, depending on the nuances: Even as they competed, Lennon and McCartney took songwriting credits together and shared the glory equally. All four Beatles welcomed experimentation; their mutual connection freed them each up to try new ideas.

That’s how it’s supposed to work with successful teams, says Greg Clydesdale, Ph.D., of New Zealand’s Lincoln University. They’re driven by mutual support inside the team and the challenge of a formidable rival from outside.

You could say it didn’t turn out quite like that for Oasis.

When Oasis split up in 2009, the seething resentment and animosity between the two brothers broke out in a war of insults that still hasn’t let up.

Liam says, “I’m a better singer than him. I’m the man, man.” And Noel says, “He’s the angriest man you’ll ever meet. He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

It was a bizarre interchange. But a bitter rivalry can do that to anyone. NYU’s Kilduff recently ran an experiment in which people could choose whether to be honest or deceptive with a partner.

It turned out that an Ohio State fan was four times as likely to lie when paired with a partner from archrival Michigan than when paired with one from, say, Caltech.

The Caltech guy, in turn, would no doubt lie to someone from MIT, and so on through the pantheon of school rivalries and onward into corporate life. And then there’s the deranged Alabama fan who poisoned Auburn’s oak trees. Rivalries can be so psychologically engaging that morality no longer matters.

Avoiding those kinds of emotional misjudgments is key to dealing with a rival. (More about that shortly.) On the other hand, it may pay to trick your rival into doing the stupid stuff.

UC San Diego’s Gneezy recently dubbed this strategy the “Materazzi effect,” after Marco Materazzi, a soccer player on the Italian national team in the 2006 World Cup finals.

During overtime in that match, the trash-talking Materazzi expressed a personal interest in a rival’s “whore” of a sister. Twice. Enraged, the rival, French team leader Zinedine Zidane, head-butted Materazzi in the chest.

Zidane was ejected from the game. Materazzi’s team went on to win the cup, in part because Zidane wasn’t around for the shootout that determined the outcome.

Beware, though: Sometimes angering a rival just makes him mightier. Adrenaline works even faster than steroids to boost strength.

A lawyer, for example, might deliberately rile a witness to throw him off balance. In another recent incident, fast-food workers, as part of their campaign to win higher wages, bought tickets to a dinner where McDonald’s USA president Jeff Stratton was speaking. Then a cashier stood up and demanded to know if it was fair that the company was still paying her $8.25 an hour after 10 years on the job.

The video went viral, and a year later Stratton was out of the picture.

So what are some smarter ways to handle a rivalry? First, recognize how the emotions brought on by rivalry can affect your behavior.

At an auction, for instance, when the bidding is down to you and another person-especially someone you know-the wheels of rivalry start to spin. You’re in front of a live audience and under time pressure.

In one study of a high-stakes, time-sensitive auction, that scenario led buyers to overpay by an average of 71 percent. Business negotiations can also take on that same win-at-all-costs dynamic.

Walking away from the table for a 10-minute break, or simply saying “I’ll give you an answer in 24 hours” can help you avoid emotional errors brought on by a pushy rival and time pressure.

Maintaining a physical distance can also help defuse rivalrous emotions. That’s why experienced buyers at art auctions, for instance, often bid anonymously through a third party by phone.

But distance is not foolproof. Even in an online charity auction with the bidding down to two people, Harvard’s Deepak Malhotra, Ph.D., found that people who received a leading message (“The competition is heating up. . . Are you up for the challenge?”) were 50 percent more likely to bid again than those who were merely notified that they’d been outbid. It’s why Sotheby’s turns a profit.

Sometimes, though, you need to win a rival back to your side, particularly in the workplace. The standard advice is to try to see things from the other person’s perspective as a way of getting a grip on your own emotions.

“But they never tell you how,” says Zachary Shore, D.Phil., author of A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind.

The usual mistake is to try putting yourself in the person’s head. But that just tells you how you might act in his or her situation. The key to predicting your rival’s actions, says Shore, is to study his or her behavior-not day-today, but at moments of crisis.

These breaks in the normal pattern tend to be far more revealing of a rival’s true character. It’s in these pattern-breaking moments that you can best gauge those underlying drivers and constraints.

What’s your move if you don’t like what that reveals? Brian Uzzi, Ph.D., who teaches leadership at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, recommends the three Rs:

Redirection is about shifting your rival’s antagonism onto someone or something else that is the true root cause of the rivalry.

Reciprocity means doing the rival a favor, out of the blue, without asking anything in return.

And once those have been done, rationality involves getting the rival to see how working together can benefit you both.

That’s the template, anyway. Real life doesn’t always work out so neatly.

At one corporation, for instance, the chief financial officer was working one of those grip-strengthening gadgets—as if squeezing his visitor’s testicles—when an exec went in to present his budget request.

“Tell me the numbers,” said the CFO. Then he insisted on cuts, no explanations wanted.

Redirecting the CFO’s anger was a matter of mentioning the government regulators who mandated the programs covered by the proposed budget.

Rationality consisted of pointing out what was in it for the CFO: “You could go to jail if you don’t do this,” the executive said finally. “These are mandatory compliance expenses.”

Then, to sweeten things a little, the executive added that a reputation for manufacturing safe products would quickly reward the CFO with bigger profits as the company moved into emerging markets.

There wasn’t much reciprocity. But two out of three did the job of bringing a rival in line and keeping the budget intact.

One final thought to keep in mind: As much as you may hate your rival now, as much as you may want to rip out his heart and scatter his ashes across the nearest septic waste pond, it may not always be so.

Rivalries lead us to put on “perceptual blinders.” We block out mitigating or redeeming factors and focus all our concentration on the rival as enemy. And maybe that’s how it has to be, at least while the battle is being fought.

Later on, though, when the blinders come off, old adversaries often discover a powerful bond: It’s not just that they shared the same glory days. Without a worthy rival, without that guy, there might not have been any glory days in the first place.

Would Bill Gates have accomplished as much had there been no Steve Jobs? Would there be a Magic Johnson without Larry Bird? Or an Andre Agassi without Pete Sampras?

One of these days, even the Gallagher brothers will realize that being rivals—loud, nasty rivals at that—has gotten them nothing but empty headlines.

Being brothers, being part of Oasis, and telling the rest of the musical world “Get out of the way, we’ll take charge here”—that’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

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Foil Your NemesisMind games and techniques to put these rivals in their place.

The Sports RivalYour Tactic: Picture the process.

He motivates your training and workouts, but on game day your rival is nothing but a distraction, says Ian Connole, Ph.D., director of the sport psychology program at Kansas State. Refocus on the process for success, he says. Picture every step specifically, and then trust your body to do what it does best.

The SaboteurYour Tactic: Keep a watchful eye.

Beware the sneak attack, warns Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Ph.D., a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis. Identifying allies is easy, but rivals may lie low to avoid reprisals. So gather a posse of allies who are in a position to keep a lookout and report any subterfuge back to you.

The Jerk at WorkYour Tactic: Misdirect him.

He constantly antagonizes you. Tries to make you look foolish. Out-maneuvers you at every turn. So just remind him (or her) of people who are more powerful or successful than the both of you, says Stephen Garcia, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan.

Play to your strengths. “The best defense is being your best self,“ says Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D., a sociologist at the University of Washington. Win her by sharing your passions instead of trying to eclipse your competitor’s. And if you lure her into your social circle, she’s more likely to stay.

* * *

Rivalries That Suck You can’t beat these people. So join them instead.

Bro RivalYour Tactic: Write a letter.

Your brother or sister will be in your life longer than any other family member, says Jeanne Safer, Ph.D., an expert in sibling relationships. Write a thank-you letter or email for something specific your sib did for you, even if it was years ago. Compliments can mend frayed family ties. Leave Mom and Dad out of it, she advises.

Boss’s AssistantYour Tactic: Drown her out.

She has El Jefe’s ear, so you can’t annoy her. But if she’s maligning you, counteract it. Stephen Garcia, Ph.D., an expert in the psychology of competition, found that an opinion repeated by one person on three occasions can become as widespread as one stated by three people. So go spread compliments about yourself!

The Ex-Best FriendYour Tactic: Wait it out.

We feel more competitive with the people we know, says Garcia. But bad blood may be temporary or situational. Wait for a change in circumstances—say, a new job or relocation—and then repair the relationship. “Whatever’s ruining your friendship right now may not be as important later on,” says Garcia.

Your Kids’ New DadYour Tactic: Listen up.

Your kids may gush about their stepdad at first, if he’s an okay dude. Don’t neg out on him; you’ll seem defensive. Remember: You had a head start in the dad race. You can still finish first if you hang in there, ask lots of questions about their activities and friends, and be available for them as a listener.

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